Nadine Dorries is right about child sexualisation. Why does this make people so angry?

If you ever wonder how human beings could have sunk so low as to commit the atrocities of the 20th century, you only have to type “Nadine Dorries” into Twitter to see the hatred that man is capable of towards his fellow man.

Or woman, in this case. I suspect part of the reason Dorries attracts such hostility is that she is attractive, and if you’re slightly deranged it is always more fun writing spiteful, hate-filled bile towards pretty women than to the sexless. I even suggested this when I interviewed her back in January, trying not to sound too sleazy, something I didn’t entirely succeed in doing, although she would only say it had more to do with her background and being “an unusual creature in politics”.

Dorries has whipped up the mob this time by suggesting that children are being too sexualised, too young. She told Radio 4: "The problem is that we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the UK, the highest rate of abortion.

"We have an over-sexualisation of this culture which is everywhere. It is in Sky Television, in video games that children now can access, on computer games, mobile phones.

"It's on billboard advertising, it's in teenage magazines, it's everywhere and it is too much. And we have to now say, enough."

Rather predictably, she’s been attacked for wishing to return to Victorian times (people always seem to judge Victorian times by the problems the Victorians inherited, not the improvements they made), for being anti-sex, prudish, being apparently our Sarah Palin, and wishing to turn the clock back.

The strangest argument is that the sexualisation of children is a myth. Like that other “myth”, of the post-1955 crime explosion, it is one that left a surprising amount of evidence. Look at the pregnancy rates for under-16, as opposed to all teenagers; it went from 0.3 per 1000 girls aged 13-15 in 1955 to 5.1 per 1000 today. Likewise the (less scientific) percentage of girls under-16s claiming to have sexual intercourse has vastly increased from 5 per cent in 1964 to 38 per cent today. And the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among under-16s rose by 58 per cent in just four years of the 2000s.

Critics of Dorries accuse her of being unscientific in her use of data, yet does anyone seriously dispute these figures, which are the best indicator of sexualisation?

The reason that she attracts such hostility, and receives so little back-up from quiet sympathisers, is that a non-judgmental approach to sex is part of a series of status-defining beliefs by which university-educated people identify themselves. There is nothing to be gained by suggesting restrains on sexual behaviour or displays – no one young, sexy or in any way cool will support you, because any form of sexual conservatism is seen as highly unattractive, strange or even sinister. That is why there is this almost knee-jerk reaction to what Dorries says, despite large numbers of people feeling extreme unease about hyper-sexualisation.

This is not only because of the obvious social costs of unwanted pregnancies, but because overt sexuality is a form of aggression and an intrusion into people’s private space. And as countless teenagers have told countless surveys, heightened sexuality also makes them feel insecure and miserable and aware of an increased sense of sexual competition. If the main ambition of so many teenage girls is to be considered sexy – and having worked in men's magazines, I can tell you it is – something has gone seriously wrong in our feminist utopia.

Sexualisation is also un-egalitarian. As Michel Houellebecq once wrote, a world in which sexual pleasure is made a pre-eminent good is one where the gap between haves and have-nots is magnified along new dimensions. The ever-presence of sexual images rubs failure in the face of low-achieving men, further creating the feeling of a society in which anyone who doesn’t make loads of money, drive a fast car, appear on television or have sex with models is considered a failure. Pointing this out doesn't mean you want women to wear metal chastity belts, have unmarried mothers confined to lunatic asylums, or walk around Whitechapel in a top hat carrying a bag full of medical instruments.

The turning-back-the-clock analogy is wrong, anyway, as social attitudes are more like a metronome, swinging from one extreme to another, from excessive licence to prudery. Dorries is just trying to push them back to the middle.